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Saturday, June 23, 2012

Let's make jam!!!!

I love jam. It's good on toast, with ice cream and on crackers with peanut butter (maybe even some cookie butter.)

I had a ton of blueberries and blackberries and I needed to use them up before I could no longer.

I decided to make jam, because, why not??

Jam is pretty simple to make. You have fruit, pectin, sugar and possibly some lemon juice.

For this recipe I had 5 cups of the blueberry/blackberry (with 5 TB of fresh lemon juice) mixture.

Here it is cooking for a couple of minutes.

It already looks good. After it cooks and gets to a rolling boil that can't be stirred down it's time to add the sugar. I think I added about 5 cups of sugar (and this is the low sugar recipe.)

It's starting to look like jam. Bring it back to a rolling boil and cook for one minute more. You need to stir this whole time!

During this time I like to heat the water in my water bath (for canning the jam.) I also sterilize the jars in that water. At the same time, I put the lids and rings in some very hot water to sterilize and get the glue on the lids soft.

Once the jam is done, I used a "canning kit" to funnel the jam into the jars.

After the jam was canned, I cleaned the rims, added the lids and rims and into the bath they went.

Let the water get to a simmering boil, put the lid on the canner and process for 10 minutes. Once the 10 minutes is up, turn off the stove and let the jars sit for 5 minutes.

After the 5 minutes take the jars out with a jar lifter and place them on a towel, not touching, for 24 hours. The lids will "pop" down sealing the jars. After this is done, they can be put in the cubbard for a year I believe until opened. I don't think they will last that long though. ;)